I thought hdparm â€“d /dev/hxx was the command to use to check whether DMA was on or not, and it would come back with either using_dma=0 (off) or using_dma=1 (on). And then if you discovered it was off, you used hdparm â€“d1 /dev/hxx to turn it on. And then to make it permanent you add a line at the bottom of the hdparm.conf file. Iâ€™m sure thatâ€™s what I did some time ago in one of my Ubuntu installs. But my SUSE 10.3 is obviously not responding to the command properly.

I'm on a different machine at the moment but will have a look at /var/log/messages and syslog when I'm back on the laptop.

I was just following on from the /dev/hxx in Marrea's post. Having said that, PATA devices can still be /dev/dhX, it depends on whether you use the older or newer (and still marked experimental) ATA drivers.

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." (Albert Einstein)

All I'm really trying to find out is if there is any way of turning DMA on for my DVD drive in SUSE. Are the errors I'm getting perhaps something to do with hdparm not being compatible with drives which are labelled as sdx rather than hdx?

Well, I'd been thinking that myself and was actually looking at that sdparm site last night. However, I couldn't see any command which tells you whether you have DMA enabled or not. I am in Fedora 7 on a five year old Evesham desktop at the moment, where the hard drive is shown as sda and my DVD ROM is /dev/scd0, and the hdparm commands don't seem to work properly on those either. Fortunately you can download sdparm from Fedora's Add/Remove Software, which I have just done. As far as I can see, the command sdparm -a /dev/sda [or /dev/scd0] doesn't seem to reveal anything about DMA.

I have xine and libdvdcss installed in Fedora. xine-check reported:

[ hint ] Your DVD drive seems not to be attached via ATAPI. This might be due to the use of an ide-scsi emulation. If you really have a SCSI DVD drive, your SCSI controller is likely to do perfect DMA, so there's no reason to worry about this. However, if you're using ide-scsi, there is a chance that DMA is disabled for the DVD drive. Moreover, I don't know how to enable DMA in that case, so you probably have to live with some performance loss. (FIXME: check for /proc/ide, provide solution)

plus various OUCHES !! about missing plugins. However, DVDs play perfectly OK in xine in spite of these warnings.

Well, I have finally given up on SUSE10.3 on my HP laptop. I have replaced it this evening with Gutsy Gibbon, which so far seems to be much better suited to the hardware. However, OOo Writer (2.3) has just crashed on me, so I hope that is not going to be a regular occurrence!